At the same time as increasingly sophisticated technologies increasingly disconnect human beings from the natural world, a network of electronic “intelligence,” global in extent, gradually emerged.
At first it was under close human supervision, but it has steadily grown more autonomous. Consider the difference between radio broadcasting and the Internet: the former is under tight human control and serves a very specific purpose, whereas the latter has established itself as a permanent, constantly available electronic infrastructure of undefined scope and reach. What has been happening over recent decades is the increasing co-ordination of intelligence-endowed machines, so that they operate without need of human supervision.
The efforts now underway to create a 5G electronic ecosystem are the necessary precondition for developing and perfecting a global Artificial Intelligence network which feeds on the very fast transfer of large amounts of information. This global electronic “brain,” innocuously called the “Internet of Things,” is already impacting on our lives.
Through the Internet of Things, more and more things will be linked to the Internet and made “smart” by being given the ability to function autonomously. On smart motorways your car will drive itself while you, wearing your VR headset and haptic vest, play interactive computer games in the back seat; and in your smart house your fridge will autonomously order more eggs, milk and cheese for you via a wireless connection with a supplier.
But the reality is that the Internet of Things is itself the precursor to what has been called the “Internet of Thinking,” in which human beings will find themselves having to live in relationship to the vast global electronic intelligence.
It will be active everywhere in our environment and we shall be obliged to interact with it in order to accomplish the simplest of tasks. In the Internet of Thinking it is not hard to see the lineaments of an electronically supercharged totalitarian state, with unprecedented control over the minutiae of individuals’ lives. The possibility of this happening will only be increased by the thousands of new mini phone masts and satellites irradiating every inch of the planet with millimetre waves.
For this is what 5G means: it means putting in place not just an improved telecommunications system, but rather a new “system of systems” – the infrastructure of electronic totalitarianism....read more>>>...
